neck.
Yuri Ron did not follow them. He felt ill. His stomach was sour and the acid taste snaked into his mouth. The evening was hot and he had had a hard day. Nikolai would probably have passed out by now, so it would be safe to go back to the apartment. Tomorrow or the next night Yuri would try again. It would be hard to wait. He would try someplace else. He would be patient, careful, efficient. He would.control his emotions. He would make his contribution. Tomorrow or the next night.
When Rostnikov walked down Krasikov Street toward his apartment that evening, he had a plan for the night. First, he would engage in small talk with Sarah. Before they ate, he would spend his forty minutes lifting weights in the comer of the room and she would read or watch television. During dinner he would suggest that they go for a walk and Sarah would accept. She would also know that he had something serious to say. On the walk he would tell her about Josef's posting to Afghanistan, try to comfort her, and hope she would have some words of comfort for him. They would stop for something, maybe an ice cream, and come home early to talk or read. It would, he thought, be a slow, perhaps sad, night in which he would not think of the KGB, of the Gray Wolfhound, of the man who had dived off Gogol's statue. He hoped it would not be one of those nights when bad news angered her, turned her against him, transformed him into the evil cossack of her imagination. These outbursts were always brief and regretted, but they lingered in his memory and he feared that frequent setbacks would increase the periods of anger. Her anger made him feel helpless. Rostnikov could deal with murderers, pompous superiors, scheming KGB officers. He could play their games, even gain a satisfaction from small triumphs, but his wife's emotion swept him away. He never considered joining her in anger. Rostnikov had learned even as a boy not to be angry. It wasn't that he controlled his anger. It was simply that he didn't feel it. The world was strange, sad, ironic, comic, even terrible, and, yes, there were people who were monsters. It wasn't that he forgave them. He often thought that anger might be far more satisfying than the frequent state of amused melancholy with which he felt most comfortable.
When he reached the apartment and stepped in, Porfiry Petrovich saw and accepted that the night he had planned was not to be. At the wooden table that had been given them by Sarah's mother sat his wife and two men. Sarah, hep red hair tied loosely back, looked up at him with a small smile. Rostnikov moved to her and kissed her moist forehead. The warm evening brought out her distinct, natural smell, which always came back to him as a nearly forgotten pleasant memory.
He shook hands with Sasha Tkach and then reached out with both hands to shake the left hand of Emil Karpo. Karpo's grip was firm.
'The hand is strong,' said Rostnikov, sitting at the last unoccupied chair and reaching for the bread in the center of the table. Tkach had a teacup in front of him.
'It is better than it was yesterday, and yesterday it was better than the day before,' Karpo said.
'Cousin Alex is a good doctor,' said Sarah with pride.
'He's a good doctor,' Karpo agreed.
Rostnikov looked at his two unexpected guests, who looked at each other to determine who would speak first. When Porfiry Petrovich was chief inspector in the Procurator's Office, the three of them had been an unofficial team.
Rostnikov had used their strengths, worked around their weaknesses, encouraged their initiative. In turn, they had given him loyalty. It was not the first night they had sat around this table, and Rostnikov hoped that it would not be the last. From his pocket, Rostnikov removed the pistol he had taken from Katya Rashkovskaya and placed it carefully on the table.
'It is no longer loaded,' Rostnikov said, turning to Sarah.
'Did someone…?' she began.
'Just to shoot a toilet,' said Rostnikov.
'A TK,' Karpo said quietly, looking at the weapon. 'A six-point-three-five-millimeter blowback automatic of good quality. The pistol was supposedly designed by a man named Korovine in 1930. There is a mystery about Korovine. He designed weapons in Belgium during the First World War and took out a patent for a double-action internal-hammer lock for automatic pistols, though there seems to be no evidence that it was ever actually manufactured. Then, after disappearing for almost ten years, he designed the TK in the Soviet Union and was never heard of or from again.'
'So you can tell me nothing about this weapon?' Rostnikov asked with a smile.
'On the contrary, Comrade Inspector,' said Karpo. 'It is striker fired and… You are making a joke of some kind?'
'A poor one, Emil,' said Rostnikov with a sigh, looking at Tkach, who stared into his empty teacup.
Rostnikov caught his wife's eye and nodded at Tkach.
'More tea, Sasha?' Sarah asked, getting up.
'A little,' he said, pushing back the wisp of hair mat fell over his eyes.
'Sasha was saying that the baby is outgrowing her clothes,' Sarah said, moving to the teakettle on the stove hi the kitchen. 'She'll be ready for the suit I knitted for her when the first cold days come.'
Rostnikov removed the pistol from the table, placed it back in his pocket, chewed on his bread, and waited. Sarah came back with a cup of tea for him and poured more for Tkach, who thanked her.
'Today I went to the circus, the New Circus,' Rostnikov said after swallowing a mouthful of bread.
'I was near there this morning, near the university,' Tkach said. He seemed about to add something but stopped.
'All right,' Rostnikov said with a sigh. 'Emil, you begin.'
Karpo looked at Sarah and then at Sasha before fixing his eyes on Rostnikov and saying, 'You were principal investigator on the murder of Sonia Melyodska, a soldier, in the Vdnkh Metro Station last year. You filed a report.'
'In November, the third week,' Rostnikov said, reaching for another piece of bread.
'Precisely,' Karpo agreed.
'And?'
'And why did you file the report with those of the serial killer of prostitutes?' Karpo asked.
The normal question at this point might have been Why do you want to know? or What's going on? But Rostnikov had learned to be patient with Emil Karpo, whose own patience was infinite and whose sense of humor was nonexistent.
'I did not file it with the reports on the serial killer of prostitutes,' Rostnikov said. 'It never entered my head that there could be a connection. I investigated for two weeks, relatives and friends of the murdered woman, the possibility of a random killing by a subway thief. I worked with Zelach searching for witnesses. Nothing. I submitted the report to open file.'
'I found it in the file of murdered prostitutes,' Karpo said.
Rostnikov was well aware that the prostitute killer was not Karpo's responsibility. It might be reasonable to ask why he was even reading the file. Rostnikov didn't ask. Instead he looked at Sasha Tkach, who didn't appear to be listening.
'Sasha,' Rostnikov said, rubbing the stubble on his own chin. 'How would you account for this puzzle?'
'I, I wasn't…' Tkach stammered as if awakened from sleep.
'You should,' Rostnikov said.
Sarah asked if the two guests were staying for dinner. Both said they were not. She excused herself and began working in the kitchen while the three men continued.
'Emil has found a report on a murder I investigated in the wrong file,' Rostnikov explained.
'A misfiling.' Tkach shrugged. 'Someone pulled your report and accidentally placed it in the wrong file. It happens.'
'The number on Inspector Rostnikov's report is in the three hundred series. The number of the serial killing file is in the two hundred series. They are not close,' said Karpo. 'In addition, the original number on Inspector Rostnikov's report has been lined out and the new number written neatly in its place. There are no initials to indicate who did this or why.'
'So?' asked Tkach, looking at Rostnikov.
'Someone must think my killer and the serial killer are the same,' said Rostnikov. 'But who thinks so and why? Why would anyone besides me even pull the report? Why would they refile it without talking to me and to the investigator in charge of the serial murders? I gather that'
